Friday 17 September 2004 20.24 EDT
First published on Friday 17 September 2004 20.24 EDT

It's never been much fun being a pioneering black artist within the American movie industry. Penurious depression-era director Oscar Micheaux managed, against incredible odds, to fund, write, shoot, direct, edit and distribute films with black stories and using black talent in the 1920s and 1930s. He gave his life to it, and the reward for his troubles was to be completely forgotten for over half a century.

Dorothy Dandridge had star written all over her after Otto Preminger's Carmen Jones, but the US and Hollywood were still too racially backward in 1954 to accept a black beauty on screen.

Sidney Poitier broke down many doors, but not one of his films would make your Desert Island DVD list or mine. Melvin Van Peebles left one cultural landmark behind him, Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, which is almost unwatchable today, and the most talented group of black American film-makers - the UCLA movement that included Charles Burnett, Larry Clark (no relation), and Haile Gerima - barely got its films edited, let alone distributed.

And then Spike Lee changed everything. A decade after the blaxploitation movement was completely shut out of Hollywood financing in the wake of Jaws and Star Wars, Lee's frustrated generation of black talent came banging on Hollywood's plantation gate. This time they planned on staying for good, and largely thanks to Lee's motor-mouth and his Napoleonic little-guy's indomitability, black film-makers, actors, editors, and camerapeople are an unremarked-upon presence in Hollywood. A century late, but oh well.

Trouble was, Lee himself turned out to be a fairly second-rate film-maker. He's made some arresting and provocative movies, but his oeuvre is slimed by instances of anti-semitism (Mo' Better Blues), misogyny (She Hate Me) and homophobia (passim). And judging by some of his public utterances - promising to beat white boy Wim Wenders with a bat, for example - he can be a pretty third-rate human being. You can thank Lee profusely for his achievements in finally opening up Tinseltown to black Americans, but if you want to see the greatest living black American film-maker at work, rent Charles Burnett's Killer Of Sheep, not Do The Right Thing. *

Career highs Do The Right Thing, Malcolm X. Last year's Bamboozled, which was like a black thumb jabbed in white America's eye, proved why Spike Lee is still worth having around.

Career lows Girl 6, Summer Of Sam.

Need to know He's spent a decade trying to get his Jackie Robinson biopic made. Robinson was the first black player in major league baseball, so the parallels are obvious.

The last word "Black folks can't be racist! White folks invented that shit!" What was that you were saying about the Jews, Spike? Grow up!